


that ultra-kind of love

by pumpkinless



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: First Kiss, M/M, Post-Season/Series 06, Telepathic Bond, sheith are canon t'hy'la i don't make the rules
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-16
Updated: 2018-06-16
Packaged: 2019-05-24 05:15:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14948247
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pumpkinless/pseuds/pumpkinless
Summary: “Takashi,” he whispers, eyes closed tight.“Keith,” Shiro whispers, more urgent, but it’s the only word he has right now. His tongue can’t twist around anything else, his throat can’t vibrate at any other frequency, and it’s like all he knows in the universe is this one thing.





	that ultra-kind of love

**Author's Note:**

> t'hy'la (vulcan) - friend, brother, lover

The hair, Shiro can deal with.

“What's cookin’, good lookin’?” Lance says, staring down at Shiro flat on his back with a grin.

“We could pass you off as an Altean,” Pidge says, laughing.

“You know, white eyebrows were at the height of fashion in my day,” Coran adds, waggling his own and twirling his mustache around one finger. “Oh, the trendy pictures of my youth I could show you!”

It's the everything else that Shiro isn't so sure about.

Allura touches his shoulder, and she is so sorrowful. “He has been looking for you for . . . for so long, Shiro.”

He's not—

“He carried you,” Hunk says, with no small amount of awe.

Shiro doesn't remember that. But he doesn't remember a lot right now.

***

He sleeps. He dreams, he wakes, he sits up in his makeshift bed in the back of a cave on some nearby planet with water and a breathable atmosphere, and he watches Keith polish his blade. Keith doesn’t say anything; he smiles and brings Shiro water or bits of food, and cares for him until Shiro has to lie back down and sleep again.

He’s never been so tired, but he wants Keith to speak to him.

“Keith,” he finally says. Begs, really. It's his first word in—well, Shiro doesn't know how long they've been here. Hunk said this planet has two suns, and one always rises in the north as the other sets in the south. Makes it difficult to count days, he says, when they never see the stars.

The hand that strokes the side of Shiro's face is not quite foreign. No bigger or smaller, but more sure of its touch, like it belongs to a Keith who knows himself. Shiro thinks he might know something about why that is, a buried trove of knowledge he needs to unlock. It’s what wakes him up, when the dreams blend together: pilot, champion, paladin—

Nothingness?

It hurts so much to talk. He tries to tell Keith all of his, but it won’t quite get past his stuck throat. Keith sits at his bedside and breaks apart in front of him.

“Takashi,” he whispers, eyes closed tight.

“ _Keith_ ,” Shiro whispers, more urgent, but it’s the only word he has right now. His tongue can’t twist around anything else, his throat can’t vibrate at any other frequency, and it’s like all he knows in the universe is one thing.

Keith holds his hand and buries his face in Shiro’s shoulder until Shiro falls asleep again.

***

Pidge is there when he wakes. It’s odd, but Shiro can’t remember the last time he woke up and saw something other than Keith’s face looking at him.

“We’ve contacted the rebels,” she says, an exhausted but satisfied smile on her face. “Matt’s coming. Says he’s pissed you went and dyed your hair again without him.”

Shiro cracks half a smile. He can’t help his eyes darting around the room of his cave.

“He’ll be back soon,” Pidge says. She’s like Matt—always too knowing when it comes to Shiro and Keith.

Pidge tells him about the communications tower she’s building out of the planet’s natural resources. There’s a native population a couple miles out, so she has to be discreet, since they don’t seem to have reached an age of space exploration yet and Pidge doesn’t want to be the person to explain to them about aliens.

 _We’re the aliens now_ , Shiro thinks. It settles him.

***

Shiro gets better at staying awake. He can manage a whole hour, now.

Coran is probably his most frequent visitor, unless you count Keith, which Shiro doesn’t. Keith is almost always there. No one seems to care that Shiro isn’t talking still, hasn’t progressed beyond saying Keith’s name, but that’s okay. The way Keith looks at him, like he’s a man Shiro knows and wants to relearn all at once, is enough.

“Keith,” he says. It comes out in a sigh. Lance gags in the background and makes loud noises about leaving.

 _Keith_ , he wants to say. _I’m sorry I didn’t—_

“Stop that,” Keith says fiercely, his grip on Shiro’s hand going tight. He leans over Shiro, more emotion on his face than Shiro has seen in a long time. “You—it’s not . . . .”

Keith’s lower lip twitches like he’s holding back tears, and the grief that washes through Shiro is not all his own.

 _How_ , Shiro wants to ask, but he’s been awake for a long time now, and instead he just—drifts.

***

“I think it’s the lion,” Keith tells him. He’s laying with Shiro, head propped up in one hand while the other traces lines across Shiro’s face, down his neck, draped half over Shiro like that’s where he belongs. “I just—I touch you and I know things. Like you’re speaking, but not. And you can feel what I feel. It has to be the lion.”

 _Great_ , Shiro thinks. _Mind reading_.

Keith’s mouth twists. “I think it’s more like mind-melding, actually.”

 _Vintage_ , Shiro thinks. It feels like he’s taking this pretty well.

The smile goes sad. “I never told you, but—but after you left, I used to watch your favorite TV shows. Took me a while to get through that one, though.”

_And the movies?_

“Of course. You love those movies.”

Keith smiles down at him, happy and open. The new scar on his face is painful to look at, but it suits him—makes him look strong. Mischief enters his face, the scar moves easily with him, and his hand slides up, pressing his thumb to the dip of Shiro’s bottom lip, index finger to the side of his nose, and middle finger to his eyebrow. He grins.

 _Can you hear me better this way?_ The corner of Shiro’s mouth twitches up.

Slowly, Keith relaxes his palm, and the touch of his thumb becomes a caress of Shiro’s bottom lip, his eyes fixed there like he’s finally thinking about putting their puzzle pieces together.

“I haven’t seen you in so long.” Keith’s voice cracks, just like the dam he’s held together so long inside him, and everything comes rushing out. “I thought—every day, I thought about you. If I had known that you weren’t—”

 _Hush_.

“No,” Keith says, squeezing his eyes shut tight. “I really thought you were fine—no one ever said there was anything wrong. _You_ never said there was anything wrong. I could have fixed it, Shiro. I would have brought you back so much sooner.”

_Baby, it’s okay._

“It’s not,” Keith says, voice rough. “It’s never okay. You needed me, and I wasn’t here.”

They lapse into silence. Keith’s eyes shine with unshed tears that he blinks away, finally breaking his gaze away. Shiro tries to figure out what to say, but it’s so hard when the last year feels like a half-remembered dream—he doesn’t know what happened, around the gaps the team has tried to sketch out for him, or what he imagines must have happened.

Embarrassment creeps into Keith’s touch. For what, Shiro doesn’t know—almost crying, maybe, or telling him the truth.

“Keith,” Shiro whispers, even though it makes his throat ache like it was torn out of him. He needs full attention for this, and when he gets it, he smiles. _Keith. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few_.

Keith stares down at him, hand stilling, suddenly contemplative. “I don’t know if I ever believed that one.”

An image flashes through Shiro’s mind, a composite of Keith’s whispered confessions and something that other him must have seen or heard: a ship, a battle, a last minute decision made in hopes that something beautiful could still exist. Keith willing to give it all up for the sake of so much more, and the sudden shock of relief when he didn’t have to. He pushes it towards Keith, imagines the picture seeping through his skin into Keith’s fingertips.

“I’m not the few that matters,” Keith says in his defense. He would believe that, wouldn’t he?

_You brought me back._

“I always will.”

_You’re the few that matters to me._

***

Today is the day Shiro leaves the cave.

It sounds much more momentous than it really is.

He doesn’t go far, just to the mouth of the entrance, and only with Keith and Allura steadying him on either side while he tries to get his legs to listen to him. He worries, quietly, that he won’t ever be comfortable in this body, that it will always fight him when he tries to do the simplest things, but it’s too soon to think about that. He’s barely been resting a week, now; it’s too soon for dire predictions.

“Comfortable?” Allura asks. He nods, grateful, and she plants her hands on her hips and smiles. “Well, it seems like you’re recovering quickly! It was no small amount of Altean alchemy to get you back to rights, but I don’t think you should have any lasting problems.”

Gratitude flows through him, and Shiro wishes he could explain to her how much this means to him. Allura is smart, though—she lays her hand on his shoulder, and that says everything.

***

“So you can’t speak at _all_?”

Shiro shrugs. His body still feels like a battered piece of driftwood finally washed up on the shore—the only places that feel cool and good are the spots where Keith touches him. Speaking feels like his throat tearing itself up just to get through the first letter, so he tries not to push his body into doing something it so clearly doesn’t want to.

“Wait a minute,” Lance says. He grabs Shiro’s forearm. “You’re telepathic now. Think something to _me_!”

 _You’re being an ass_ , Shiro thinks pointedly, but the message unfortunately does not go through. Lance pouts loudly and vocally, and annoying as he is, he’s a good distraction.

“It’s not going to work, Lance,” Keith says with a snort. “It’s not about Shiro, it’s about the black lion.”

“But how _cool_ would it be!” Lance says excitedly.

 _Pretty cool_ , Shiro thinks, and Keith isn’t touching him but their eyes meet and they know. Keith grins, ducks his head down before Lance can see it. He doesn’t need words or a telepathic space connection with Shiro to know him.

***

“What was it like?” Keith asks. Their bodies lay like parentheses in the dark, fingers laced together between them.

 _Empty,_ Shiro thinks.

That’s all it was—emptiness. Less empty when someone sat in the black lion, like a presence nearby or a sign you have to squint to read down the road. That was the closest he ever came to some semblance of human contact, and he wonders if that was how it was for Keith, alone in the desert with nothing but the ghost of his dead family around him.

He has the sense memories of this body, still. Some things linger, maybe thoughts trapped inside the firing neurons of his brain sometime in the space of time between the other him passing and Allura saving his life.

Shiro doesn’t like to remember it. The feeling of being trapped in a cage close to bursting open and simultaneously too vast a person for all of existence to contain him is haunting, a purgatory that even now he can’t let go of. Or maybe it can’t let go of him.

Ice shards in his heart, that’s what thinking about the astral plane feels like. He tells Keith this.

Keith’s hand squeezes his.

“You’re safe now.” I saved you, he doesn’t say, but Shiro is grateful all the same.

***

Hunk teaches him and Keith how to play a game called Monsters and Mana. _Alteans have tabletop roleplaying games_ , Shiro thinks, staring down at the spread in front of them on the floor as Coran cackles and flips through a book, its pages close to his face so no one can get a look at them. Keith’s contentment sings through him.

 _I want to be a paladin_. Keith’s hand taps his arm once in acknowledgement, and he relates it to Hunk.

Hunk closes his eyes and takes a moment. “Of course you do,” he mutters. “But don’t you think maybe—”

“He said he wants to be a paladin,” Keith says, firm. His fingers grow tight on Shiro’s arm, grounding and protective all at once. Shiro tells him to be nice, but he’s pleased to see Keith so defensive. It wraps around him like a down comforter, light and warm.

“Let the man be a paladin!” Pidge says, grinning as she plunks the character piece down in front of him.

“Yeah, I think we can all agree he deserves it this time,” Lance says with a heavy sigh.

Shiro’s brow furrows. This time?

“What—what do you mean this time?” Keith asks before Shiro can tell him he doesn’t want to know.

That makes the Paladins and Coran freeze, like they’ve slipped up and let free some kind of a secret that wasn’t supposed to get out. Lance exchanges an awkward look with Hunk, but for once his voice fails him, even with his mouth open. Allura steps up to the plate.

“We played once before,” she says gently. “Back before—all of this. Shiro very much enjoyed being a paladin then as well.”

All of them are still learning the rules of how to deal with this Shiro, this Shiro who is the _real_ Shiro, even though Shiro has doubts about how to define his relationship to himself when so much has happened. Some days, they tiptoe around it like this, unable to handle either him or the fact that they spent months—over a _year_ —and didn’t know. Others, it’s difficult to keep them from beating down all his walls in their grief.

 _It’s okay_ , Shiro whispers into Keith’s mind. And it really is.

***

 _I’ve always been the real me,_ Shiro says. _Even when I was him, I’ve always been me_.

“What does that mean?” Keith murmurs into his ear. Shirtless, his hot skin burns through Shiro’s thin sleep shirt all along the line of his back.

 _He had my memories_ , Shiro says—he needs to say it, needs to own this on his terms and not anyone else’s. _He had my personality. My face. Everything I knew—he knew. He tricked you because he was me, and he never knew what they did to him._

Keith sighs, heavy. He pulls Shiro tighter against his chest.

 _I had a lot of time to myself. I made my peace with so many things, Keith, things that—that I can never tell you because I can’t say them to myself_.

“Your time with the Galra.”

_Yeah._

Keith’s head bows forward and touches the back of Shiro’s. Every point they touch is a blessing of the highest kind. Shiro never knew if they could get here, if either of them could ever learn to live in the quiet moments without startling away. It would be unfair to give him this much hope if he didn’t have faith in Keith.

 _I do remember,_ Shiro says, and stops. It’s strange, the way his memories work—some things are completely gone, probably forever, but other things filter in over time. _I remember you told me you love me_.

The breath stops in Keith’s chest, his whole body so still.

_You said I was your brother. You love me._

“I don’t—”

 _I’m not asking for an answer, Keith. I just want you to know that I remember_.

Silence reigns for one long moment and neither of them know what to say to each other.

Keith shifts away, and he tugs at Shiro’s shoulder until he rolls on his back. The near pitch-black dark of the cave hides his face from Shiro, but the touch of his hand on Shiro’s forearm traveling upward is unmistakable. Keith slides his palm over Shiro’s cheek, the tenderest touch he’s ever felt, and Shiro closes his eyes just to focus on it.

“I never know what to call you,” Keith whispers. His thumb strokes back and forth, hypnotic. “You are—”

He loses his words or his courage, Shiro isn’t sure, so he turns his head just a few degrees and presses a dry kiss to the heel of Keith’s palm. Words fail him too.

“Everything,” Keith says, voice thick with tears. “You are _everything_.”

***

The next morning, Shiro opens his eyes to Keith sleepily observing him already. “Hey,” he says.

Shiro hums in response—it doesn’t hurt as much as it once did, and neither do his joints ache quite as fiercely as he shifts to roll onto his side. Perhaps this really is his body—he only needed to rest.

“Sleep well?”

Shiro nods.

“I saw something last night,” Keith says, quick like it was on the tip of his tongue and he worried it would fall off. “I didn’t mean to but—permanent mind meld.”

Slowly, Shiro reaches out and brushes one finger over the back of Keith’s hand. _Tell me_.

When we were talking . . . .” Keith hesitates. “You didn’t say it, but. You love me.”

 _I do_. That was never in question for Shiro, but he realizes now that Keith’s new certainty about himself can be lost in the face of the unknown. _Keith, I always will._

He draws Keith into their first kiss on the floor of a cave on a planet neither of them can name because it’s the most natural thing in the world. It’s just the sweetest, gentlest press of lips, as if the two of them are something youthful and innocent together. It fuels Shiro, makes him want to stand up and shout their love out to the whole world.

A drum beats in his chest, once, twice, and he pulls back just enough to look Keith in the eyes. What he finds there is wild and scared and _thrilled_ beyond measure, more than either of them could ever have expected or hoped for.

Their second kiss, Keith bridges the distance, and it’s better—slicker, hotter, more about movement and a give and take than the sheer experience of presence.           

 _Home_ , Shiro thinks. _I am home_.

 

**Author's Note:**

> so how about that new season huh
> 
>  
> 
> [tumblr](http://disloyalpunk.tumblr.com)


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